1.7.9-Sarah1281
Brick!Club 1.7.9 A Place where Convictions are in Process of Formation The courtroom is badly lighted for some reason. I wonder if that’s symbolic? There’s little goodness and truth here. The judges aren’t well-dressed and are super bored. Such a dreary room. No one noticed him because they were all too busy looking at Valjean the convict. That is definitely meaningful! No one is ever able to see who Valjean really is because when he’s not hiding under an alias they can just see the fact that he was a convict and so is an evil and irredeemable beast no matter what they thought of him before. And then he sees Champmathieu and he understands immediately why there was such confusion. It’s not exact and he looks far different now (I wish the movie would have let us see more of Champmathieu so I could know for sure what he looked like) but he looks like an older version of the first Valjean we met. He hates the world, he is wild, he is poor, he might as well have spent nineteen years in prison. He is what would have happened to Valjean without the bishop and perhaps even just if he had not broken parole. And now he has to decide to give himself up to save this man who is so like he once was and who likely will not change from being like that so that he can return to being that man as well. This is the best and clearest picture he’s ever had of how far he had fallen. The fall was slow, I imagine, and when he woke up to what he had become he didn’t have a clear frame of reference for what he once was unless he was just comparing himself to average people. But this, raised so high after having been so low and to be plunged back into that…Oh Valjean! “This creature seemed to be at least sixty; there was something indescribably coarse, stupid, and frightened about him.” Oh Valjean! This is the part I’m having difficulty getting through. Everyone, when they noticed him, behaved with the utmost respect. He really is the polar opposite of Champmathieu here. A throng of “cruelly curious heads” there to get off at Valjean’s fall. We still have people like that today and it is a problem .Twenty-seven years ago he had been here again and suddenly he can’t see a difference between the two. He promises himself that he won’t condemn himself back to that. We’ll see how that goes. Valjean calls his trial the most horrible moment in his life. I guess that’s one defining moment compared to nineteen years of moments none of which jump out as the worst. And it’s this or his crime, I guess. And now he has to watch it all play out again as a spectator with an older version of him. It does sound maddening. How is he even managing to stand there? Hugo spells out the significance of a crucifix in this courtroom where there had not been one during Valjean’s original trial and that is that God had been absent before. God was there now but Champmathieu’s fate is still in Valjean’s hands. Honestly, I don’t know whether actually seeing Champmathieu would make me more or less inclined to tell the truth. On the one hand I would want to help but on the other I would not want that to be me. He hides his face for fear people will see him. Bamatabois is on the jury! I kind of love that. Javert has left already, of course. I wonder if it would be easier or harder for him if he was there. They’ve all been there for three hours and aren’t bored yet. Javert knew he’d be bored before he even went. I wonder why they would even consider trying him for Gervais after trying him for the apples or why they are bothering with the apples and not Gervais? If it’s life it’s life. *Must* they waste everyone’s time trying to see if they can kill him, too? Champmathieu is one of those fantastically uneducated Hugoian peasants who doesn’t even know what’s really going on and is just confused why everyone’s mistaking him for this Valjean guy and probably wondering if the idea has any merit after all since they all seem so sure. Asch line study anyone? Hugo is judging what counts as eloquence of the bar. Bossuet reference! Even if it is the wrong one. The defense attorney is an idiot. I do wonder what the penalty for a convict breaking his ban is? I would have thought it would be life imprisonment but that’s what he’d get for the theft and the attorney wants the broken ban penalty and not the stolen fruit penalty. He shouldn’t just accept that Champmathieu is Valjean! Even if he believes it, it is bad form to admit it to the jury! And he’s just saying that his client is a dumbass for not admitting it? Fail. He’s right that they haven’t proven the theft but he’s not even challenging the highly circumstantial nature of this, the fact that three of the witnesses are convicts whose word cannot be trusted, and the last witness just accused his superior of being this same convict! It does not seem like this should be a difficult case to win! Because the idiot lawyer agreed that this was Valjean there was no longer any disputing the case and the idiot prosecutor just ran roughshod all over him. I wonder if it was like that in Valjean’s original trial where he had at least been guilty of what they were accusing him of. Why the hell are all these books and classical allusions even part of this trial? Dear God! Well maybe the ground wouldn’t be slipping under your feet, defense attorney, if you weren’t such an idiot and actually tried.